"The Etoile project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.2 of the Etoile User Environment for UNIX-like systems. The Etoile project aims to produce a user environment for desktop and small form-factor devices, with tight integration between components. The 0.2 release is primarily targeted at developers interested in a GNUstep-based environment. This release includes improvements to the Camaelon theme engine, providing a clean and modern appearance to GNUstep-based applications. This is combined with the Etoile Menu Server, providing a horizontal menu bar similar to that found in Mac OS, and making this the first Etoile release with enough features in place to be usable on a daily basis." There are screenshots too.

Let's not forget that you can of course have detachable menus with a horizontal menubar as well. Apple's first attempt to theme OPENSTEP with a MacOS look'n'feel had this. I'm not sure whether the submenus were detachable, but why would that be any harder than when the main menu is floating?

NeXTSTEP/Openstep's Floating Menus/Tear-off Submenus restoring state upon close that Apple has started to use again in Pages.app (Andrew Stone's Cocoa AppSuite uses as much as possible) are hindered by the Top Menu bar being ubiquitous across the screen. And for the lazy user the right mouse button for NeXTSTEP/Openstep did allow access to an applications full menu system.

- where do you see similarities between the menus in rhapsody and beos? iirc, beos doesn't have a unified menu and no detachable menus either.

- the floating "inspector"-window of stone create, apple pages and other cocoa apps has nothing to do with the floating main menu used by *step. it's just a tool-palette. and you can't even tear off the subpalettes - as you can do with the palettes of mellel (redlers.com).

- why is the top menu bar hindering these kind of palettes?

- i also like the main menus which show up where you click a mouse button. iirc, riscos used them, fluxbox and some other wm use them, and an alternative workbench for amiga os (scalos?) also used them. great for experienced users, but confusing for most users. expeciallly, if you have to remember which functions are in the context menu and which are in the main menu. and if you combine both, the menu can become far too big.